


no grave to bury sorrow in

by ephemera (incognitajones)



Series: Finding Home Without a Map [6]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Feelings Realization, Missing in Action, aka Jyn finally gets a clue, cameos by Bodhi and K-2SO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 08:12:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12104463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/pseuds/ephemera
Summary: Cassian had been missing in action for two standard months and three weeks now.





	no grave to bury sorrow in

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve tried hard to make each story in this series stand alone (as much as possible), but I think it’s finally reached the point at which you need to have read at least the [previous installment](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10820967) to get much out of this one...

“Three months.” Bodhi sat down beside her with a mug of tea, curling his hands around it for warmth. 

Jyn looked up from the bowl of lukewarm congee she’d been dipping her spoon into without really eating. She hadn’t slept well; her eyes were dry and bleary, and her brain felt dull. The most coherent response she could manage was “Huh?”

He tapped his fingers against the chipped rim of his cup and didn’t look at her. “I asked Antilles, and he said Intelligence personnel get three months before their quarters are reassigned.”

“Oh.” Jyn’s ribs suddenly constricted around her lungs and she struggled to breathe normally. “That's longer than I’d expect,” she said, thinking of the Alliance’s shoestring budget and overcrowded bases.

“Apparently the rules are different for them. Because of, you know, top secret mission stuff.” Bodhi nudged closer on the bench, pressing his leg into Jyn’s, and she leaned her cheek against his arm for a moment, feeling the stiff scratchy weave of his flight suit.

Cassian had been missing in action for two standard months and three weeks now. Which meant by the time she came back from her next mission, his quarters would probably be assigned to someone else. 

She sat up straight again and stirred her spoon listlessly through the rice paste in her bowl, trying to make herself feel hungry. Regular, reliable meals had spoiled her; she’d gotten too used to the concept that food could be semi-appealing as well as simply fuel.

“Speaking of top secret mission stuff…” Bodhi raised his eyebrows and made an exaggerated, inquisitive face. “Where are you off to tomorrow?”

“Nowhere important,” Jyn said. “Out with SpecOps for a recon. Hardly worth the briefing.”

Bodhi didn’t look like her casual tone fooled him, but he was kind enough not to say so. He just sat with her, sipping his tea, until her uneaten breakfast was cold enough that she could justify throwing it out.

 

Cassian hadn't changed his door code before he left. 

Jyn frowned at the steady green light. She'd been fully prepared to spend more than a few minutes slicing the lock to get in; she'd even borrowed a few tools. But just in case, she’d tried the code she knew first, and the door clicked open.

She ducked into the room and shut the door behind her quickly, not wanting to be seen. Then she stood waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Nothing had changed, of course. His bed was neatly made, the desk bare except for a few datachips. Jyn fingered one and considered trying to slice into them, but why bother? Cassian would never leave sensitive information lying around, even in his private quarters. 

She opened a drawer at random and found nothing but a stylus and a few of her hairpins—the damned things were always falling out, and Cassian always saved them for her. 

For some reason, the sight of those pins punched a hole in the airlock where she’d sealed away her unacknowledged grief. Pain flooded her body and she hunched over with a gasp, arms wrapped around her belly as though she’d been wounded.

Jyn had been desperately hoping against hope for something, she didn’t know what: just a tiny personal artifact that she could take to remind her of him. She didn’t have any images of Cassian; as a spy, he evaded cameras like they were lethal weapons. She’d never even seen a holo of him other than the one in his official file. 

She stumbled over to the bed. Rolling onto her side in her usual spot and closing her eyes, she tried to summon up the sense memory of Cassian’s warm solidity behind her, his breath on her neck and his arm around her waist. She thought of the first time she’d been in this room alone, and what she’d done, and the way he’d looked at her when he found her in his bed. She thought about the last time she’d been in here, when she’d kriffed things up beyond any hope of repair.

Jyn knew he hated going to Pitann, even if he'd never admit it. In her guilt at not being there before he left she’d done something unforgivably stupid. She'd only wanted to make him feel better for a little while, to take away that hollow exhausted look in his eyes. Instead, she'd made it worse. 

And then he’d vanished without a word, before she’d managed to scrape up the guts to try and fix things with him. Though given her track record, the odds of that were pretty terrible.

She’d sliced into the file for Cassian’s last mission without bothering to be subtle—she didn’t care whether Draven caught her, what could he do to her?—but there was nothing unusual about it. Just a normal meet with a longterm asset, one who’d never seemed anything but reliable. He’d checked in as scheduled once en route. After that: nothing. Neither Cassian nor K-2 nor the asset had ever reported in. There was no Imp comm chatter to explain what had happened and no local record of a seemingly unrelated fatality.

She curled tighter around the sharp pang in her gut and wrapped her arms around her legs, pressing her forehead to her knees. She’d been so sure that she could handle this emotion by locking it away in a hidden compartment it would never escape from. By the time she realized her heart had gone soft and leaky, it was too late. She’d panicked and hurt both of them worse by trying to cut it out and cauterize the wound.

Jyn had been convinced that was the best thing to do. But now Cassian was gone, she saw that it made no difference. She should have known that after Scarif, it was always going to end in agony, no matter how hard she tried to protect herself.

The regret was the worst. If she was going to feel this much pain, she should have had the guts to seize the pleasure with both hands too. If not for her own cowardice, she could have kissed Cassian every day he was here—she should have, for all the good it had done her not to. She could have tried to find more ways to show him that his touch was the sweetest thing she’d ever known in a life that hadn’t had much room for sweetness.

Jyn had learned before she was ten years old that if there was something you desperately wanted to keep, it was best to hide it. Automatically, she pressed her palm over the hard angles of the crystal tucked inside her shirt. But she was beginning to wonder whether it was quite the same with people. 

She’d never even tried to tell Cassian that if it were possible, she’d want to stay with him. She hadn’t said that if it were up to her, he’d never get on a ship and fly away without her again. She’d just assumed that it wouldn’t make a difference. Maybe it wouldn’t have, but now she’d never know. 

She shoved her face into the pillow, but Cassian had been gone for too long; it didn’t hold any trace of his smell. Hot pain seared her throat, her eyes, but she didn’t dare let it out in tears. She had to maintain some self-control. Right now she found it hard to care about the mission, but tomorrow people would be depending on her. Maybe the adrenaline would give her a boost and make it feel more urgent to stay alive.

She crushed Cassian's pillow in her arms and squeezed it, gasping for breath around the choking mass of grief in her throat. She stayed there, compressed into the smallest space possible, until exhaustion defeated her and she sank into a restless sleep.

 

“Nice job, Sarge! We’ll make a Pathfinder out of you yet.” Dameron smacked her on the shoulder and Jyn winced. She’d wrenched her back climbing to the rooftop extraction point and the painkiller in the field medkit hadn’t been strong enough to dull the throbbing spike driven up her spine. Ducking away from Dameron’s arm, she sped up her pace. She couldn’t get off this ship soon enough. 

Bodhi was in the hangar, bobbing nervously from foot to foot, his eyes darting through the dispersing squad. When he caught sight of her he pushed his way to the foot of the ramp and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Jyn. Cassian’s back.”

Her duffel fell out of her grip, crushing her foot. “What? When?” Her head spun and the harsh white light bouncing off the ice walls of the hangar was suddenly blinding.

“A couple hours ago. He’s back, but he’s hurt. Badly. And Kaytoo is in pieces. They’re trying to reassemble him, I heard, but they don’t know if it will work—”

Jyn never remembered exactly how she got to the medbay. She might have levitated, or maybe she’d managed to teleport using the Force. All she knew was that one moment she was staring at Bodhi’s worried face, his mouth moving, and the next she was shoving past a medic telling her that Captain Andor had just come out of surgery and wouldn’t be awake for hours yet, wouldn’t she rather come back later?

“No,” she snapped. “I want to see him right now. I don’t care if he’s awake.” 

The medic rolled her eyes, but let Jyn pass. 

Cassian was flat on his back, cocooned inside the only intensive care medical capsule Echo Base had. That told Jyn how serious his injuries were even before she saw the bacta patches layered over most of his torso, the inflated cast around his left arm, and the grey pallor of his face. He looked like—like a corpse, honestly. She opened her mouth, and closed it again, unable to ask. 

“It’s not as bad as we originally thought,” the medic said cheerfully. “Captain Andor will need another session in the tank tomorrow to accelerate bone regrowth, but he should make a full recovery.” 

She looked far too young to be responsible for anyone’s medical care, and Jyn didn’t trust anyone so relentlessly chipper. But she wanted to believe it. She swallowed, looking at the slivers of Cassian’s bruised flesh barely visible between bacta pads, his arms limp at his sides. “Can I stay for a while?”

The medic bowed her head and tapped at a datapad, her feathery antennae moving in opposite directions as she checked on something. “Fine. You’ll need to leave in an hour, though. All visitors have to clear out at 2100.”

She pointed at a hard molded plastoid stool; Jyn dragged it over beside the capsule and sat. Her back twinged and she thought about asking for another painkiller. But if she told anyone about her own injury they’d probably try to drag her off into another room for treatment. Safer to keep quiet. 

The next hour was a blur. It felt like an eyeblink and yet it lasted longer than any of the weeks since Cassian had been declared MIA. Bodhi came by at one point; she felt his firm, reassuring grip on her shoulder, and she was pretty sure that she heard Draven’s voice talking to the medic as well. But Jyn didn’t look away from Cassian’s body in the capsule. 

His eyelids were dark, the hollows under his eyes were black against his sallow skin, and a massive bruise distorted the line of his jaw. She didn’t dare try holding his hand; too many sensors, needles and shunts bristled out of it. The closest she could get was to lay her palm on the slick plastic next to his body, one fingertip barely brushing the cool skin of his wrist. 

Jyn thought of Chirrut, and her mother. She didn’t know if it would help, but she closed her eyes and willed every drop she had of health or vitality or Force—whatever you wanted to call it—to flow into Cassian through that one square centimetre where their flesh touched. He was alive; he’d come back; he would be healed by any means within her power.

 

The next morning Jyn requested a day’s leave, but didn’t get released from her regular duty rotation. General Merrick informed her that since Cassian was now considered stable, she could wait until after her assigned surface patrol to visit him, which meant she wouldn’t get back to the medbay before he was in the bacta tank for his final treatment. She gritted her teeth and held back a string of curses.

But she’d been able to find out that K-2’s reconstruction was going better than hoped. At least, the droid techs had managed to reboot his data core so that he could give them instructions. His decapitated head had stared at her from the clamps holding it in place sideways, his voice far less intimidating without the effect of his tall frame. “These technicians aren’t very skilled. Is Cassian awake yet? Tell him that according to my analysis, mission parameters were less than 60 percent fulfilled—”

“Tell him yourself once he’s recovered, you rude bucket of bolts,” she said, feeling strangely reassured, and headed for the medbay without taking off her parka.

The obnoxiously cheerful medic with the delicate orange antennae was there again. She smiled at Jyn and said Cassian had asked about her when he woke that morning. “I told him I had to kick you out last night.”

A hot blaze of embarrassment flushed up from Jyn’s neck to her hairline. She desperately wanted to ask if Cassian had said anything else or whether he’d seemed happy at the thought of her being there, but she drew the line at interrogating teenaged strangers about his emotional state.

Today, she was determined to stay as long as necessary. She wasn’t leaving until she’d had a chance to see Cassian conscious. She dragged the uncomfortable stool into a corner of the bacta immersion room and took out her datapad to revise the tactical plan for an upcoming Pathfinders infiltration. Every time one of the medical droids passed by, she glared at them, fully expecting them to tell her to leave. Let them try to kick her out; she was prepared for a fight. But nothing happened.

The next time the young medic came into the room, Jyn asked her about it. “What’s up with the droids? They haven’t given me any attitude about staying this time.” 

She remembered the days after Scarif, when if she wanted to know how Bodhi or Cassian were doing she had to lurk in the corridor outside the medbay entrance and waylay a person she could convince to spill the details. The 2-1B droids would only repeat _You are not authorized to be given that patient’s confidential medical information_ in their irritatingly soft, soothing voices.

“Oh, that’s because Captain Andor named you his medical proxy.” The medic beamed at her like someone out of a training holovid on approved bedside manner.

“His proxy?” Jyn’s stylus slipped in her hand and scratched across the datapad screen. “What does that mean?”

“You have the right to be informed of his medical status and the authority to make care decisions on his behalf if he’s incapacitated,” she recited from an obviously memorized script.

The expression on Jyn’s face must have been startling. The medic’s antennae unfurled, standing up straight from her head, and she took a step backward. “Did you not know?”

Jyn swallowed, hard. “No.” She looked up at the bacta tank. Cassian’s face was hidden behind a breath mask and the dark hair drifting over his closed eyes. “Does it say when he did that?”

The medic looked down at her datapad and flicked a fingertip across it. Her antennae quivered uncertainly again. “About nine months ago.” 

Shortly after she started coming to his room to sleep—just sleep—with him. 

Jyn pressed a hand between her eyes, rubbing at the throbbing knot of tension there. Why hadn’t Cassian changed it after she started avoiding him? It was possible he’d forgotten. But that wasn't like him, meticulous and forward-thinking enough to request this administrative detail in the first place. If he’d left her name in his file even after Pitann, it had been deliberate. 

“Do you want to reciprocate?” the chipper medic asked. “Or did you already have someone else in your file?”

“No,” Jyn said automatically. “I don’t have anyone.” 

Was that still true? 

Cassian hadn't locked her out of his quarters. He'd put her name in his official record, given her both responsibility for and power over him, and hadn't deleted it. She knew that Cassian didn't care for empty words; she’d thought that was why he never said anything about his feelings for her, because there was nothing to say. Maybe he'd been trying to tell her something in other ways, and she hadn't understood.

“Well, you can decide later,” the medic said. “Right now it’s time for Captain Andor to come out of the tank. You can observe, if you want. Just stay out of the way.”

Jyn waited, hovering without any idea what to do, as the droids extracted Cassian from the tank. Once they had him dried off and resting (on a regular cot this time, with fewer tubes sticking out of him), the medic checked his vitals, dialed down the sedative drip and said that he should wake within fifteen minutes.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” she added in a low, conspiratorial tone. “Just make sure you call me if he doesn’t wake up soon, or if he needs any more pain medication.” 

Jyn cringed. She was beginning to hate the medic’s totally inaccurate, romanticized assumptions about their relationship—but not enough to correct the misperception, especially if it meant she’d have more time with Cassian. So she kept her mouth shut, pulled the uncomfortable stool over beside his bed, and sat. 

She thought it would take longer for Cassian to wake, that he’d be confused and groggy for a while. Instead his eyelids flickered once, twice, and he focused on her almost immediately. His pupils were dilated, his eyes wide and dark, but alert. She heard his heart-rate on the monitor lurch and pick up speed before it evened out again. He scanned the room with a subtle movement, and then looked back at her. 

Jyn stared at Cassian. Her lips parted, but she couldn’t speak; her mind was vacant as a blown-out building. After a long, strained silence, all she could think of to say was, “You’re back on Echo Base. They just took you out of the bacta tank.” It couldn’t hurt to remind Cassian of where he was, in case he was still disoriented.

“I know.” His voice sounded like there was ground glass in his throat. “They told me yesterday. And this morning.”

Jyn looked around for anything to drink, and discovered a drinking bulb of water hanging from the side of the cot. She lifted it up and held the spout to Cassian’s mouth, figuring the medic would have told her if he shouldn’t be drinking. His cheeks hollowed deep as he drained it in a few long gulps and she let the empty bulb fall back. 

She cast about for something else to say. “Did they tell you about Kay? He’s back online and driving the techs round the twist, trying to supervise his own repair without any hands.” She wiggled her fingers in illustration.

Some of the lines of tension marking Cassian’s face erased, and his eyelids drooped shut. “Good,” he sighed.

Jyn clamped her hands together in her lap to keep them still. She swept her eyes over him methodically, analyzing each minute change from yesterday. The cuts and scrapes were scabbing quickly. The visible bruises had faded to violet and green and the swelling on his jaw had gone down. His face was a better colour and his eyes less sunken; the bones of his skull didn’t show as clearly through the skin.

“I can feel you staring,” he mumbled. “Does it look that bad?”

Jyn ought to leave and let him rest. But she had to know. She still had no idea how to ask. She pushed her fingernails into her palms and expelled the words out of her tight throat on a single breath. “The medic said you put my name in your file. A proxy, or something like that.”

“I did.” He blinked, but his heavy eyelids lifted only part way, and he didn’t say anything else.

“Why?” 

“Because I trust you.” His tone suggested he was just stating an obvious, inalterable fact, like the speed of light or the orbital period of Hoth. 

“But why? I mean, we weren’t talking, and you still didn’t change it...”

“Jyn.” His voice was soft and scratchy with fatigue, his sleepy eyes disturbingly tender under long lashes. “I know you. And I know you’ll always back me up, whether we—” The words trailed away into a cough and she held the drinking bulb up again, but he waved it away. “No matter what. You’re not the kind of person who lets that change things.”

She almost laughed. Of course Cassian would give her the benefit of every doubt. If only she’d managed to figure out her own feelings sooner, before she’d fucked everything up. Cassian might be generous and more forgiving than she deserved, but it was still too late to turn back time to when she had what she didn’t know she wanted. Her fingers plucked at the edge of the sheet, faded and worn like everything Rebel-issue. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” He slapped clumsily at the mattress beside him. “C’mere.”

She looked around warily for any droids before she perched on the cot, keeping most of her weight off it so she wouldn’t unbalance his fragile body. He reached out to her, inching his fingers across the bed to touch her knuckles where they were clenched on the side of the mattress. “I will always be your friend. Always, Jyn.” 

“Good.” Her smile felt tremulous, unsteady, but she turned her hand over and laced her fingers carefully through his. He squeezed her hand once, feebly, a fluttering pressure.

She stayed there until his breathing steadied and he fell asleep again, until her hand was numb, until the 2-1B made its rounds at the end of visiting hours and kicked her out.

 

Ironically, by the time Cassian was released from the medbay two days later, his room had been reassigned anyway. A batch of new personnel transfers had shifted everyone in Corridor T around, and the medics wanted him closer to the medbay for physio while his arm healed. 

Jyn helped him move into his new quarters. K-2 would have done it, but he was still under repair and didn’t have any limbs yet. Besides, it didn’t take long; everything that Cassian owned fit into two duffels and a footlocker. They borrowed a flatbed droid from the cargo hangar and made one trip.

When Jyn grabbed an armful of coats to hang up, something small and thin jabbed her finger. She dipped her hand into each pocket of Cassian’s parka, searching for it, and pulled out another one of her hairpins. 

She laughed, shaking her head ruefully. “Stars, these things end up everywhere.” She’d probably lost another half-dozen in here already.

Cassian’s gaze moved away from her and he bent down to set a pair of boots under his bed. He didn’t blush or react in any other obvious way, and yet something about him gave off a faint aura of embarrassment.

In her head, Jyn began counting up just how many pins she’d lost track of in Cassian’s quarters and came to a startling conclusion. 

“Did you keep them on purpose?” she asked, disbelieving.

“Sometimes.” He opened his other duffel and sorted through the clothes inside. “Obviously we can’t carry anything identifiable on a mission. A little thing—a hairpin, a glove—something like that, I could get away with because it could be anyone’s. But I knew it was yours.” He shook out and refolded the already neatly arranged shirt in his hands, still not looking at her. “It was… comforting.”

Something hot was sliding down Jyn’s cheek. She jerked her head down, gulping back more tears, and swiped her sleeve quickly across her face. 

Cassian’s worn boots entered her field of vision and his hands reached out to cup her elbows. When she didn’t pull away, he drew her slowly to him, his arms sliding around her in a loose hug. She pressed her forehead into his chest, rubbing her face dry on his shirt.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly. “I didn’t mean to make you unhappy.”

“You didn’t. I did.” Her ragged laugh had a wet backdrop of tears. “I fucked up, and now you probably hate me, and it’s all my fault. I was scared and I thought it was safer to quit because I didn’t know how to make this work, any of this—” She shrugged vaguely. “But I guess that doesn’t matter now.” 

“I don’t hate you, Jyn. I don’t think I could.” His beard grazed her temple, and his words moved warm across her skin like the ghost of a kiss. She felt him take a deep breath. “And it does matter to me. I don’t want you to feel frightened.”

She'd sworn that she wouldn't let another chance slip through her fingers. Now it was here and she couldn't make herself speak. Jyn cursed herself as a coward. What did she have to lose, after all? Still, it was almost impossible to break the lock on the silence that had protected her for so long. 

“You weren’t what frightened me,” she whispered. “And while you were gone, I figured out that there are worse things than being scared.” 

Jyn forced herself to lift her head and meet Cassian’s eyes. He looked puzzled, confused, but not angry. She lifted a hand—it was shaking, she couldn’t steady it—and traced the half-healed scab on his cheekbone. “Could we—could I try again?” She took a hitching, sobbing breath. “If you still want to.”

“Oh, Jyn. Yes. Of course I do.” Cassian closed his eyes and turned his face into her palm, brushing his lips softly across it. 

He did that so often when she touched his face; she thought because he didn’t want her to see his expression. That was okay, it gave her more opportunities to look her fill at him. The lines of his nose and jaw were cut sharp and strong. His narrow face would never be soft, unless perhaps in an old age she doubted either of them would live to see. But he was with her here, now, and she was going to stop thinking about the future for as long as she could.

He kissed her palm again, and she shivered at the lingering heat of his mouth. All her nerve endings were sparking. A dizzying combination of aching tenderness and fierce want roiled inside her. She moved forward, pushing Cassian backward slow step by step until his calves hit the edge of the mattress, and gently pressed on his shoulders until he sat.

Her hands hovered over his body. “Can I…?”

Cassian’s eyes rounded slightly and he nodded. 

“Unless it hurts,” she amended, glancing at his arm.

Cassian looked down at it too, as if he’d entirely forgotten about his wound. “I don’t care.”

She kneeled on the floor in front of him and undid the fastenings of his shirt carefully, one by one. She pushed it off his shoulders slowly, and touched him with the same gentle delicacy. Her breath hissed at the sight of his torso, still dappled with massive bruises, though now they were faded to poisonous green and yellow. 

She laid her hands flat on his chest and rubbed her fingertips through the coarse dark hair. Under her right palm, his heartbeat was as familiar as her own. She spread her fingers over the curve of his ribcage and swept them down to span his thighs, conscious of the architecture of his body in a way she’d never been before: every joint and muscle and small soft place.

Jyn put her hand on his belt and glanced up. His lips were parted; he didn’t say anything, but he nodded again. She was so close that she could see the darker ring around the golden brown centre of his eyes. Without looking away she pulled open his belt, and eased his pants carefully down his legs.

She leaned down and pressed her lips to the raised seam of scar tissue on his forearm before lifting her head again. Cassian was watching her with the terrifyingly tender look in his eyes that had sent her running before. It was just as frightening this time, but she was determined to be brave. He set his hand on her chin and drew her toward him slowly, giving her time to pull away. But she didn’t.

They kissed until their mouths were swollen and raw, until they were clutching at each other, until it wasn’t enough. Jyn’s clothes had evaporated somehow—she hadn’t paid attention and frankly didn’t care. She crawled into Cassian’s lap and wrapped her legs around his hips. This was what she wanted; she needed to be as close to him as possible, skin to skin, eye to eye. She didn’t look away as she rose up and slid down on him, found her balance and started rocking slowly, bringing their bodies together in an easy, steady rhythm. He sighed into her mouth and planted his hands on her lower back to support her.

She wanted this lazy, melting pleasure to go on forever, with no endpoint. She didn’t feel any urgency to find release but it came gradually, welling up through their bodies like sunrise—Jyn first, with a gasp and one heel dug hard into the base of Cassian’s spine. When Cassian followed she held him tight, clinging with all her limbs, whispering _yes, yes, yes_ into his ear while he shuddered and his arms banded tighter around her.

He pushed her hair out of her eyes and kissed her once more before hooking his chin over her shoulder and resting it there. They stayed like that, still locked together, breathing in unison and feeling the edges of their bodies blur and blend. 

“Will you stay?” Cassian murmured into the point of her shoulder, his voice soft, neutral.

A pang of guilt clenched in Jyn’s belly that he still thought he had to ask. She turned her head into his neck and mouthed kisses up the taut line of his tendon. “Yes. Until you’re sick of me.” 

She tightened her arms around him again, sliding one hand up his back to pull him even closer. He sighed into her hair, his body relaxing against her. Jyn couldn’t smile—what she felt was too big to fit inside a smile—but stubborn joy teased at the edges of her mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Profuse thanks to **rain_sleet_snow** and **sobsister** for their thoughts on this.
> 
> The title, like that of the previous story, is from Amelia Curran's "Blackbird on Fire."
> 
> The concept of Cassian giving Jyn his medical POA is definitely not original to me; I know that I've encountered it in a few other stories, but (of course) at this point I can't remember which/whose. If you know who should have credit for this bit of fanon, please comment.


End file.
